ABSTRACT
Nick Cave's music and writing his thinking-through-art', as it were, in the model of one of the poets he cites, Wallace Stevens has been deeply concerned with religion. In offering a cultural resource to engage with these things, religion itself is a powerful system of metaphors, a language with which, as Jacques Derrida remarks in Faith and Knowledge', it is almost impossible not to engage: difficult to say Europe without connoting: Athens-Jerusalem-Rome-Byzantium, wars of Religion, open war over the appropriation of Jerusalem and of Mount Moriah'. Christ saw them as enemies of the imagination, who actively blocked the spiritual flight of the people and kept them bogged down with theological nit-picking, intellectualism and law. More complex and harder cases lie within the personal sphere. Developing this combination of New and Old Testament rhetorics and sensibilities lies at the core of the next four, nearly flawless, albums, which stand as quite an astonishing achievement in contemporary music.
